Characters in Search of Jeff - I

When I began a memoir on my late brother Jeff Sharlet, I never imagined the fascinating journey that would ensue, a journey of discovery not only about my brother but myself as well. Along the way I’ve encountered many interesting people – well over 150 – who inhabited Jeff’s life and times during his last decade.

Jeff was a Vietnam GI before the war came up on the public’s radar, later a founding leader of the GI antiwar movement. He died young in ’69. I’ve been mightily assisted in the ‘search’ for my brother by Karen Grote Ferb, a very close friend of Jeff’s during his college days.

Four years ago we launched this blog, which I’ve used to put together a preliminary draft of the book underway. In the next several posts, I’d like to introduce and in some instances re-introduce, through a gallery of photos and brief descriptions, a number of the individuals I’ve met “Searching for Jeff.”

                                                                                          

                                                                                                       Bob Sharlet

Lucien Conein, ‘Lawrence of Vietnam’

Captain Lucien Conein, 1945

Though they both played roles in a clandestine operation in Saigon now part of history, my brother Jeff never met Lou Conein. Neither did I much later – Conein died in ’98, but my college roommate knew the man in Vietnam, both were CIA. The closest I’ve got to Conein was his legend. Born in Paris, raised in Kansas, he was a swashbuckling soldier of two wars. In Europe he served as a commando behind German lines, then moved on to Asia where he fought alongside the French and Vietnamese as they drove the Japanese from Indochina.

          Fast forward to 1963, Conein’s back in Vietnam, the embassy’s secret liaison to the South Vietnamese generals planning a coup. As the plot thickened, Conein and his general staff contact rendezvoused as unobtrusively as possible. One time it was at the dentist both men shared, Conein was in the chair ostensibly waiting for the drill when General Don slipped in the side entrance. Behind closed doors in Washington, Conein became known as “a kind of T.E. Lawrence.”

          What was the connection to my kid brother Jeff Sharlet? A Vietnamese-speaking GI, Jeff and fellow linguists played a supporting role to Colonel Conein in the successful coup of November 1^st – by wiretapping the generals. The White House wanted to know what was being said when Conein wasn’t around.

George Shriver, founder of the campus left

Young Socialist Alliance meeting, Indiana University,

George Shriver presiding, 1962

          A stalwart of the Left, Jeff and I met George at Indiana University (IU) in the fall, 1960. I was there in the PhD program, Jeff a freshman. George was my fellow grad student in Russian studies. Though I thought I knew the guy pretty well, obviously I missed the main story. Sure, George was studying for a PhD in Russian lit, but he was also quietly working as a skilled political organizer on campus as I only learned many years later. He had come out to IU from Harvard where he’d been a member of  the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), junior affiliate of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.

Before George dropped out for a career in radical politics, he set up a YSA chapter at the university as well as a branch of the national Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), created in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Though overlapping and very small, the groups were focused and highly dedicated. In effect, George Shriver was the link between the Old Left and emerging New Left at conservative Indiana University.

During Christmas break at the end of fall term ’60, George was organizing a trip to revolutionary Cuba. My brother signed up to go, but it turned out there weren’t enough takers, so Jeff never made it to Havana

Ditty Bopper at Phu Bai

Phu Bai, the mountains of Laos to the west, 1964

          At the beginning of this memoir project, Karen and I were trying to locate ex-GIs who’d been based at Phu Bai, a small intelligence outpost just below the border of Communist North Vietnam. Jeff had served there, but we knew little about the place. We turned up an ex-Vietnam GI who had been posted at Phu Bai. He had been a Morse code operator, ‘ditty bopper’ for short, and, like Jeff, was doing secret work. Ditty Bopper gave us a lot of helpful information.

          Then one day he asked Karen about the memoir project. He knew Jeff had preceded him to Phu Bai, but not that he subsequently became a founder of GI protest against the war back home. We had nothing to hide, but that was too much for Ditty Bopper. A ‘lifer’, or career soldier, he was proud of his Vietnam service and wanted no traffic with criticism of the war, even decades later.

          He cut us off, no more emails, but we had learned a great deal and were grateful. He would shudder to see his name in this blog.

Larry Heinemann, ex-soldier-writer

A lifetime Chicago boy and an ex-Vietnam GI, the author, late ‘70s

          After the Vietnam War ended in ’75, I decided to teach a course on the conflict – as a kind of memorial to my brother. Since I was a Soviet specialist and knew about the war only from the New York Times and nightly television news, it was to be a learning experience. That’s when I came across the name of Larry Heinemann, an ex-Vietnam GI. I had the students read his first novel, Close Quarters, a gritty story of close-combat, much of it drawn from his experience.

          Many years later when I got into this memoir, I sought out the author. By then he had won the National Book Award for a later novel. I asked if he by chance  had known my brother back in the late ‘60s when Jeff was editing Vietnam GI (VGI). A lifelong Chicago boy, Larry replied, “Among those ex-GIs around Chicago, Jeff was, well, famous.”

Matt Rinaldi, antiwar chronicler

Matt Rinaldi’s ground-breaking essay on GI protest, 1972

A young man of the left and an antiwar activist, Matt Rinaldi and Jeff met at a GI coffee house near Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.  As VGI editor, Jeff went  on the road from time to time, touring training camps as well as nearby coffee houses run by activist friends. He was trawling for combat GIs to interview and other Nam stories for his next issue.

Decades later when I was spoke with Matt, he was still chuckling about something Jeff had told him. My brother had recently telephoned his parents, and our apolitical father asked his youngest son, “Jeff, are you still with those anti-groups?” Not long after Jeff’s early death, Matt Rinaldi published one the first accounts of GI protest against the war:

Vietnam GI was created by Jeff Sharlet, a vet who had served in Vietnam in the early years of the war.  He came back to the States fairly disillusioned. ... VGI was widely circulated and well received. ... It represented a significant breakthrough when it first appeared and helped play a catalytic role throughout the services.

Destiny Handelman, campus SDS leader

Destiny at rest, Bloomington, 1966

          Coming home from Vietnam in ‘64, Jeff headed back to Bloomington, to Indiana University (IU) to finish his education. By the following year the country was edging toward full-blown war in Southeast Asia. When LBJ escalated in March ‘65, protest against the war came alive throughout academe.  At IU every Friday afternoon, a small band of protestors rallied in Dunn Meadow.

          Jeff was also opposed the war and as the rare Vietnam vet on campus, was drawn into protest circles. The group became the nucleus of an SDS, or Students for Democratic Society, chapter at IU. Hostile to hierarchy, the chapter evolved a rotating 4-person leadership team.

          Bernella Satterfield, Jim Wallihan, Destiny Handelman (nee Kinal), and Jeff took turns chairing the group. Under Jeff’s aegis, demonstrations were mounted against pro-war speakers who came to campus – General Maxwell Taylor, former US Ambassador to South Vietnam; and General Lewis Hershey, Director of the Selective Service System, aka the draft.

          Eventually the four moved on – Bernella to professional social activist; Jim to academe, a specialist on labor relations; Destiny, to environmental activism, later a novelist; and Jeff to his place in history as founding leader of the emerging GI antiwar movement.

Vachel Worthington, gung-ho linguist

101^st Airborne on patrol, Vietnam, late ‘60s

 Jeff came back from Vietnam with a troubling secret. Something he couldn’t talk about. I only learned about it decades later when Karen told me. What had he done, what had he witnessed? I sought out GI buddies,  but they had no idea. Except Vachel Worthington. 

At the Army Language School (ALS), Jeff and Vachel shared a room in the Vietnamese language barracks. Most of their classmates were fairly casual about military life, something to put up with. Vachel was the exception, a gung-ho trooper, reveling in the military culture.

We located Vachel in Florida. He had a notion of what Jeff had been doing that troubled him. Vachel told me he’ been doing the same thing. As the only linguist in Jeff’s cohort to re-up – re-enlist – gung-ho Vachel was attached to the 101^st Airborne, the ‘Screaming Eagles’ of WWII fame. Specifically, he soldiered with the Pathfinders, a deep recon unit operating in the Central Highlands.

The Pathfinders’ assignment – locate Viet Cong (VC) radio transmitters and call in air strikes or artillery missions to take them out. Because VC units were often near villages, inevitably the rain of bombs and shells caused considerable collateral damage – the death of civilians. Vachel took it in stride – the fog of war.

He believed Jeff had worked with the Marines in I Corps earlier in the war on similar long range recon patrols.

          The Marines’ modus operandi was to call in naval fire missions from warships off shore with unintended consequences quite familiar to Vachel – more collateral damage. He speculated that Jeff felt guilty about his complicity in the killing of innocent civilians.

Maybe, but we’ll never know. Jeff died young, taking his secret to the grave.

Keith Willis, friend to the end

Cadet Captain Willis, Albany Academy, 1958

I’ve interviewed many people from Jeff’s life and times, but just one had known him through that final decade of his short but interesting life. Keith Willis and Jeff had gone to the same military prep, Keith two years older and an officer in the school battalion. Jeff was in his company. Both were jocks, Jeff – football  and track, Keith lettering in three Varsity sports.

Taking a degree from Penn, Keith enlisted in ASA, the Army Security Agency, to avoid the draft and possibly the infantry. He followed Jeff to ALS in the same Vietnamese program. The two of them bought a used motorcycle and on weekends cruised the beautiful California coast – up to San Francisco, down to Big Sur. Jeff and Keith both deployed and were stationed with the 9^th ASA in the Philippines; later Jeff was sent over to Vietnam.

After his Vietnam tour, Jeff went back to college, Keith into the corporate world, but the two guys landed in Chicago and kept in touch. Later, in spring ’69 Jeff fell terminally ill, but remained hopeful. It was Keith he contacted to help him draft an appeal to the government for a disability pension. The letter went off to Washington, but the reply came too late – Jeff was already gone. It didn’t matter anyway, it was a rejection letter. Keith Willis though, friend to the end.

Back to the ‘World’ – Return from ‘Nam

For a year my brother, Jeff Sharlet, and I were on different ‘fronts’ of the global Cold War. It was 1963-64, and Jeff was soldiering in Vietnam while I was studying in Moscow. I had learned Russian for my sojourn to the Soviet Union. Jeff had been taught Vietnamese for his Southeast Asian tour.

He was a translator/interpreter in the semi-secret Army Security Agency (ASA) while I was grad student on the official US-USSR Cultural Exchange. We’d both been carefully vetted for our encounters with the Communist orbit – Jeff to assure his political loyalty since his work was highly classified.

Conversely for my program, any connection to the American intelligence community would have been a disqualifier. University authorities took great care to protect the integrity of the academic exchange. Jeff and I both passed muster and shipped out to our respective destinations.

In the Moscow State University dorms in the former Lenin Hills, I shared a suite of rooms with a Soviet law student. Jeff was billeted with five other GIs in a large field tent at a US military outpost in South Vietnam, a small base not far below the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and the border of Communist North Vietnam. As he wrote home, “we are completely out of contact with the outside world here.”

Jeff’s ‘accommodations’, South Vietnam, 1964

By the ‘60s, the Cold War between the superpowers was approaching mid-point with Washington leading the West, Moscow dominating the East. Fortunately it was not a head-to-head military confrontation; instead, the Cold War was waged in the realm of ideas, propaganda, covert action, and proxy wars in the Third World.

One of those proxy wars, the hottest one, was in Vietnam, a country split into North and South by the Geneva Accords following the French colonists’ defeat in 1954. Backed by the Soviets and Communist China, North Vietnam was supporting a low intensity guerrilla war in the south. The aim was to overthrow the Saigon government and unify Vietnam under the Communist flag.

Jeff was assigned to ASA’s Detachment J, 3^rd Radio Research Unit (RRU) at a place called Phu Bai. His work included electronically eavesdropping on North Vietnamese Army communications as well as liaising with South Vietnamese commandos being infiltrated north through the DMZ and over the border.†

My academic tasks in the capital of the Soviet Union fell under the heading of Khrushchev’s slogan of ‘peaceful coexistence’, the idea that capitalist and socialist countries could coexist amicably and avoid fighting each other.

Implicit in the cultural exchange was the hope of mitigating international tensions through people-to-people programs. Hence, while I was researching Marxist legal theory for my PhD dissertation as well as studying Soviet law, my Soviet counterpart was studying at an American university.

In late spring ’64, Jeff and I had both coincidentally finished up our time abroad and were ready to head home to the States. For Jeff, it would be back to the ‘world’, as Vietnam GIs were wont to call the journey. The road back would be a long one for each of us, not just in sheer distance, but in the psychological gulfs we’d be navigating.

Reverse culture shock was just part of it – Jeff would be returning to college, quite a remove from the secrecy-shrouded atmosphere of the place  he was leaving, an area of scrub foliage and low sand dunes characterized by a National Security Agency (NSA) official as  ‘virtually a Viet Cong camp ground’.

The transition would be easier for me although, by definition in those days, an American living in Soviet society got used to being ‘watched’ and had to be careful what was said and to whom. Hence, returning to the States would be a radical change from living in a high vigilance, closed society, but that’s a story for the next post.

Jeff had gone to Asia, if not positive, at least open-minded about the US mission in Vietnam. But in the course of being involved in ill-conceived and fouled up political and military operations while simultaneously getting acquainted with ordinary Vietnamese and their culture, he had become increasingly disillusioned.†† On his return to the ‘world’, he’d have to sort out his thoughts and feelings about the war – what he had experienced ‘over there’.

Jeff’s road home began from one day to the next at the tiny base at Phu Bai. One day he was at work amidst the great heat and humidity in the working ‘uniform of the day’ – shirtless, shorts, and flip flops; the next day he was dressed in Class A’s heading for the airfield with his gear.

He was very glad to be leaving, writing presciently in a last letter just weeks before the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident in August ‘64, “I hope I get out of the Army before anything blows up in Southeast Asia.”

Jeff caught a hop on a C-123, a large cargo plane that made two scheduled trips a day in and out of Phu Bai. The plane headed south toward Saigon, making a single stop on the coast of the South China Sea at Danang.

A C-123 taxiing for takeoff

Arriving at the military side of Saigon’s vast airport/air base, Jeff took a taxi over to nearby Davis Station, home to ASA’s 3^rd RRU. He bunked there for his week’s leave in Saigon before moving on. He had many friends among the linguists (lingys) and cryptologists (crypts) there from his previous duty station in ’63 at Phu Lam, not far from the Davis base.

After a merry time drinking with good buddies at favorite bars and restaurants in Saigon, then known as the ‘Paris of the East’, it was time for the next leg of Jeff’s journey. That meant flying from Saigon to his home base, the 9^th ASA battalion located at Clark Air Base in the Philippines.

In a kind of tradition when a lingy finished his tour and was headed home, his friends would see him off – Jeff’s friends from as far back as ’62 at the Army Language School (ALS) on the California coast did just that – among them John Buquoi, Harvey Kline, Dave Gustin and, if he was in town, Fred Baumann.

The drill was an informal farewell party in the upstairs lounge at the airport – tasty toasted ham and Swiss sandwiches with lots of Dijon mustard and, of course, plenty of ’33 beer, Vietnam’s cheap brew – before Jeff shoved off for the flight line.

‘Mileage’ post at Davis Station, HQ, ASA 3rd RRU

Back at Clark, a sprawling air base, Jeff had an exit physical at an Air Force clinic. His medical report was then sealed along with his basic military file and copies of final orders in a large brown envelope to be hand-carried back to the States.

Separation processing would take place stateside. In military jargon, one was ‘separated’ until a reserve obligation was completed a few years later and final discharge papers issued.

Again, another farewell party before take-off, this one with friends at the 9^th ASA, Keith Willis and others. Jeff boarded a civilian 707, a World Airways charter under military contract, for the lift back to the States. The plane made the same stops as on the way over – Guam and Honolulu – finally touching down late at night at Travis Air Force Base north of San Francisco.

The flight was met by a military bus that took Jeff and the other GIs to a transient barracks on the base. Incoming traffic was apparently heavy because each GI was assigned to a particular bunk in an 8-man room for a specific time slot (about six hours). The following morning Jeff was shaken awake by the next GI assigned to that bunk.

He was directed to a bus for the short ride to Oakland Army Terminal where final out-processing took place. A quick breakfast at the mess hall there and he reported to the ‘Separation Processing’ facility located in a hangar.

At the front of the cavernous space, a podium and several tables were set up. Rows of wooden benches were provided for out-processing troops, a few hundred from bases all over the world. Jeff didn’t know anyone – he may have been the only ASA Vietnam GI in the group.

Separation was typically Army, slow and bureaucratic. At the podium a corporal would call out a name, directing the soldier to one of the tables or ‘processing stations’ – there were nearly a half dozen of them. Jeff would complete his business at one ‘station’ and be sent back to the benches to wait until he was called again – over and over.*

The stages of separation were:

Personnel/Records: Jeff handed over his thick brown envelope. A clerk reviewed the contents and various documents were signed.

Security: A military intelligence clerk briefed Jeff on the ASA secrecy commitment, to wit, if any classified information was divulged he would face federal prosecution, up to 10 years imprisonment, and a $10,000 fine, serious money in those days.

He was also warned against travel behind the Iron Curtain for five years, and there was one additional bizarre caution. If you were to undergo surgery involving general anesthesia, you were to notify ASA in advance so a de-briefer could be on hand in the event of ‘inappropriate disclosures’.

Equipment turn-in: A GI was expected to return all the uniforms issued him except the one he was wearing. A couple of privates unceremoniously dumped Jeff’s duffel bag on the floor and made an inventory of its contents. If any part of the original issue was missing, the cost would be deducted from the soldier’s final paycheck.

Physical Exam/Medical: Essentially blood and urine tests for which the out-processee was sent to an adjoining room.

Payroll: Jeff was given his final ASA paycheck as well as travel funds to cover the flight back to his hometown of record.

Finally at dusk after an all-day laborious process, the GIs were released and bussed to the San Francisco Airport to catch their flights. At the airport, Jeff cut out and headed into the city to revisit the town and see friends.

While in the Bay Area, John Sharlet, our cousin, who was then studying Russian at ALS down the coast in Monterey, came up to San Fran to meet Jeff for dinner. Back east the cousins had gone to prep school together, but hadn’t seen each other for several years.

A few months later in fall ’64, Jeff found himself back in school at Indiana University (IU), a college boy again, to finish his education. He threw himself into the coursework, eager to catch up on his life. Nonetheless he remained unsettled by memories of the war, but couldn’t say a word to anyone. Everything remained secret.

Jeff knew there were many other GIs deeply skeptical about the wisdom of US involvement in Vietnam. Once the war dramatically escalated the following spring of ‘65, the number of disaffected Vietnam GIs would eventually grow and become legion.

Five years later after returning from ‘Nam, Jeff took his secrets to an early grave, although not before founding the underground paper Vietnam GI, which became a rallying point for emerging GI opposition to the war.

___________________________________________

*I am indebted to John Buquoi, Jeff’s Vietnam buddy, for his help in reconstructing the ‘separation’ process.

†  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-mountains-of-laos.html

††  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/05/vietnam-coup-capers.html